It is this relaxed attitude that has made films like Slumdog Millionaire possible now. There was a time when one scene alone where the boy hero wades through excrement to reach his idol would have been enough for various nationalist groups in India to get their dhotis in a twist (no, dear Jeremy hasn’t said that yet, but give him time).
But in the new, resurgent India, nobody complained about the title, about the portrayal of grinding poverty, or about the besmirching of the image of India.
We may not be like that only. But thankfully, we no longer care very much if you think so.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
India doesn't take offence anymore/The new, resurgent India is confident enough not to care about those who take pot-shots at her
India doesn't take offence
Hindustan Times
The new, resurgent India is confident enough not to care about those who take pot-shots at her.
You may not have noticed but apparently Jeremy Clarkson was in India a few months ago to shoot a special episode of Top Gear. The show aired recently and in keeping with the general tone of fatuous school-boy humour, laced with generous lashings of the casual racism our Jeremy is so brilliant at, it took a few pot-shots at India, its slum-dwellers, the general lack of sanitation, etc.
So you had Jeremy driving around in a Jaguar fitted out with a toilet in the boot because as he described so elegantly on the show, “Everyone who comes to India gets the trots.” (That’s posh speak for what we call getting the runs.)
In one memorable bit, Jeremy stripped down to his underpants to explain to his bemused Indian guests how to use a trouser press because, of course, savages that we are, we couldn’t possibly know how to iron the creases out of our clothes. So far, so very predictable.
But what wasn’t so predictable was what followed. Nothing. Yes, I mean just that: nothing.
Nobody in India got their knickers in a twist (as Jeremy would no doubt have put it), none of the political parties held press conferences to vent about how India’s honour had been outraged, there were no processions by people upset at having their lack of indoor sanitation mocked at, and there were certainly no calls for BBC to be banned in India.
Gesture control is your last chance to feel like Tom Cruise in Minority Report (above)
Sure, there was the odd article in the newspapers and the obligatory outraging on Twitter for a day. And then, everybody forgot about Top Gear and that naughty Jeremy Clarkson and got on with their lives (with or without perfectly-pressed trousers).
If anything, the episode got much more play in the British press where the knives are always out for Jeremy than it did in India.
So why did India not explode into rage at this insult to our great nation (the oldest civilisation in the world, now that you ask)? Why did nobody call for Jeremy’s head on a silver thali? Why were there no demands for the BBC to apologise? Or even calls to shut down the channel as punishment for Jeremy’s sins?
Was it just that Top Gear has no real traction in India? That nobody knew or cared very much who Jeremy Clarkson was and thus couldn’t be bothered that his luxury car was fitted with a toilet in the boot?
Or was there something more to this? Could it possibly be that we in India have finally grown up? That we now have the confidence in ourselves to not care about what other people say about us – even if it is on international TV?
Though there is probably some merit in the first position, I’m inclining towards the latter. Yes, Jeremy Clarkson is hardly a household name in India, but that can’t be the entire story. In the past, we have displayed an incredible gift for getting annoyed/insulted/mortally offended for things that didn’t have the slightest bearing on our lives.
In 1968, French filmmaker Louis Malle visited India to make a seven-part documentary series, L’Inde Fantome and a documentary film, Calcutta.
Malle thought his was a sensitive, moving portrait of India the government of India thought he was needlessly focussing on poverty and portraying the country in a negative manner. Malle’s documentaries were duly banned and it was several years before the BBC got permission to shoot in India again.
Around the same time, a Hollywood film called The Party in which Peter Sellers plays a bumbling young Indian actor called Hrundi (yes, seriously!) V Bakshi, who mistakenly gets invited to a posh party and proceeds to trash it was released. Instead of recognising it for the comedic cult film it would turn out to be, the Shiv Sena picketed the cinemas in which it was released and succeeded in getting it banned.
Contrast this with our much more relaxed attitude to the comedic turn that was Anil Kapoor’s minuscule role in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol. Here too was an Indian character in a Hollywood movie being played for laughs (among Kapoor’s many cringe-worthy lines, this one is a classic: Indian mens are hots). And no, we were not laughing along with him as much as laughing at him.
Did anybody in India mind? Not particularly. There were a few jokey comments about Kapoor in the newspaper and TV reviews, social media duly piped in with its two-bits, and that, pretty much, was that.
Kapoor may have played the Indian millionaire as a fool, working the teeny-tiny part for a few laughs, but we didn’t see any reason to treat it as an indictment of every Indian. We were mature enough, and rational enough, to see it for what it was: a comedy cameo in an international movie.
It is this relaxed attitude that has made films like Slumdog Millionaire possible now. There was a time when one scene alone where the boy hero wades through excrement to reach his idol would have been enough for various nationalist groups in India to get their dhotis in a twist (no, dear Jeremy hasn’t said that yet, but give him time).
But in the new, resurgent India, nobody complained about the title, about the portrayal of grinding poverty, or about the besmirching of the image of India.
We may not be like that only. But thankfully, we no longer care very much if you think so.
Hindustan Times
The new, resurgent India is confident enough not to care about those who take pot-shots at her.
You may not have noticed but apparently Jeremy Clarkson was in India a few months ago to shoot a special episode of Top Gear. The show aired recently and in keeping with the general tone of fatuous school-boy humour, laced with generous lashings of the casual racism our Jeremy is so brilliant at, it took a few pot-shots at India, its slum-dwellers, the general lack of sanitation, etc.
So you had Jeremy driving around in a Jaguar fitted out with a toilet in the boot because as he described so elegantly on the show, “Everyone who comes to India gets the trots.” (That’s posh speak for what we call getting the runs.)
In one memorable bit, Jeremy stripped down to his underpants to explain to his bemused Indian guests how to use a trouser press because, of course, savages that we are, we couldn’t possibly know how to iron the creases out of our clothes. So far, so very predictable.
But what wasn’t so predictable was what followed. Nothing. Yes, I mean just that: nothing.
Nobody in India got their knickers in a twist (as Jeremy would no doubt have put it), none of the political parties held press conferences to vent about how India’s honour had been outraged, there were no processions by people upset at having their lack of indoor sanitation mocked at, and there were certainly no calls for BBC to be banned in India.
Gesture control is your last chance to feel like Tom Cruise in Minority Report (above)
Sure, there was the odd article in the newspapers and the obligatory outraging on Twitter for a day. And then, everybody forgot about Top Gear and that naughty Jeremy Clarkson and got on with their lives (with or without perfectly-pressed trousers).
If anything, the episode got much more play in the British press where the knives are always out for Jeremy than it did in India.
So why did India not explode into rage at this insult to our great nation (the oldest civilisation in the world, now that you ask)? Why did nobody call for Jeremy’s head on a silver thali? Why were there no demands for the BBC to apologise? Or even calls to shut down the channel as punishment for Jeremy’s sins?
Was it just that Top Gear has no real traction in India? That nobody knew or cared very much who Jeremy Clarkson was and thus couldn’t be bothered that his luxury car was fitted with a toilet in the boot?
Or was there something more to this? Could it possibly be that we in India have finally grown up? That we now have the confidence in ourselves to not care about what other people say about us – even if it is on international TV?
Though there is probably some merit in the first position, I’m inclining towards the latter. Yes, Jeremy Clarkson is hardly a household name in India, but that can’t be the entire story. In the past, we have displayed an incredible gift for getting annoyed/insulted/mortally offended for things that didn’t have the slightest bearing on our lives.
In 1968, French filmmaker Louis Malle visited India to make a seven-part documentary series, L’Inde Fantome and a documentary film, Calcutta.
Malle thought his was a sensitive, moving portrait of India the government of India thought he was needlessly focussing on poverty and portraying the country in a negative manner. Malle’s documentaries were duly banned and it was several years before the BBC got permission to shoot in India again.
Around the same time, a Hollywood film called The Party in which Peter Sellers plays a bumbling young Indian actor called Hrundi (yes, seriously!) V Bakshi, who mistakenly gets invited to a posh party and proceeds to trash it was released. Instead of recognising it for the comedic cult film it would turn out to be, the Shiv Sena picketed the cinemas in which it was released and succeeded in getting it banned.
Contrast this with our much more relaxed attitude to the comedic turn that was Anil Kapoor’s minuscule role in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol. Here too was an Indian character in a Hollywood movie being played for laughs (among Kapoor’s many cringe-worthy lines, this one is a classic: Indian mens are hots). And no, we were not laughing along with him as much as laughing at him.
Did anybody in India mind? Not particularly. There were a few jokey comments about Kapoor in the newspaper and TV reviews, social media duly piped in with its two-bits, and that, pretty much, was that.
Kapoor may have played the Indian millionaire as a fool, working the teeny-tiny part for a few laughs, but we didn’t see any reason to treat it as an indictment of every Indian. We were mature enough, and rational enough, to see it for what it was: a comedy cameo in an international movie.
It is this relaxed attitude that has made films like Slumdog Millionaire possible now. There was a time when one scene alone where the boy hero wades through excrement to reach his idol would have been enough for various nationalist groups in India to get their dhotis in a twist (no, dear Jeremy hasn’t said that yet, but give him time).
But in the new, resurgent India, nobody complained about the title, about the portrayal of grinding poverty, or about the besmirching of the image of India.
We may not be like that only. But thankfully, we no longer care very much if you think so.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus (STG),
Scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus (STG), analyzing which, they were able to reconstruct words that subjects listened to in normal conversation.
'Mind-reading' device comes closer to reality as scientists decode 'internal voices'-Feb 1, 2012
'Mind-reading' device comes closer to reality as scientists decode 'internal voices'
ANI | Feb 1, 2012, 05.54PM IST
'Mind-reading' device comes closer to reality as scientists decode 'internal voices'
Scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus (STG), analyzing which, they were able to reconstruct words that subjects listened to in normal conversation.
WASHINGTON: Scientists could soon be able to eavesdrop on the constant, internal monologs that run through people's minds, or hear the imagined speech of those patients who cannot speak, a new study has revealed.
The scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus (STG). By analyzing the pattern of STG activity, they were able to reconstruct words that subjects listened to in normal conversation.
"This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak," said Robert Knight, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
"If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit.
According to first author Brian N. Pasley, a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, this research is based on sounds a person actually hears.
"But to use this for a prosthetic device, these principles would have to apply to someone who is imagining speech," cautioned Pasley.
"There is some evidence that perception and imagery may be pretty similar in the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device."
Pasley tested two different methods to match spoken sounds to the pattern of activity in the electrodes.
The patients then heard a single word and Pasley used two different computational models to predict the word based on electrode recordings.
The better of the two methods was able to reproduce sound close enough to the original word for him and fellow researchers to correctly guess the word better than chance.
"We think we would be more accurate with an hour of listening and recording and then repeating the word many times," Pasley said.
But because any realistic device would need to accurately identify words the first time heard, he decided to test the models using only a single trial.
"I didn't think it could possibly work, but Brian did it," Knight said.
"His computational model can reproduce the sound the patient heard and you can actually recognize the word, although not at a perfect level," Knight added.
The study has been recently published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.
ANI | Feb 1, 2012, 05.54PM IST
'Mind-reading' device comes closer to reality as scientists decode 'internal voices'
Scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus (STG), analyzing which, they were able to reconstruct words that subjects listened to in normal conversation.
WASHINGTON: Scientists could soon be able to eavesdrop on the constant, internal monologs that run through people's minds, or hear the imagined speech of those patients who cannot speak, a new study has revealed.
The scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus (STG). By analyzing the pattern of STG activity, they were able to reconstruct words that subjects listened to in normal conversation.
"This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak," said Robert Knight, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
"If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit.
According to first author Brian N. Pasley, a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, this research is based on sounds a person actually hears.
"But to use this for a prosthetic device, these principles would have to apply to someone who is imagining speech," cautioned Pasley.
"There is some evidence that perception and imagery may be pretty similar in the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device."
Pasley tested two different methods to match spoken sounds to the pattern of activity in the electrodes.
The patients then heard a single word and Pasley used two different computational models to predict the word based on electrode recordings.
The better of the two methods was able to reproduce sound close enough to the original word for him and fellow researchers to correctly guess the word better than chance.
"We think we would be more accurate with an hour of listening and recording and then repeating the word many times," Pasley said.
But because any realistic device would need to accurately identify words the first time heard, he decided to test the models using only a single trial.
"I didn't think it could possibly work, but Brian did it," Knight said.
"His computational model can reproduce the sound the patient heard and you can actually recognize the word, although not at a perfect level," Knight added.
The study has been recently published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.
China's rise: an assessment/Speaks of an imperative need to “counterbalance” China and advocates an alliance system under U.S. leadership 2 achieve it
China's rise: an assessment
M. K. Bhadrakumar
arts, culture and entertainment books and literature
Speaks of an imperative need to “counterbalance” China and advocates an alliance system under U.S. leadership to achieve it
China's rise has been singularly dramatic. Its extraordinary economic growth has begun transforming the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region. China is embroiled in a host of problems at home. All the same, there is immense interest in seeing how the surge of Chinese power and influence is going to play out.
Interwoven with it is the angst that the United States' “unipolar moment” might be coming to an end. While the Europeans see the rising China as an economic opportunity, the Americans perceive it as an economic threat. As the balance of economic power in Asia is shifting in favour of China, the U.S. watches with nervousness. As China's GDP rises, the countries on its periphery get irresistibly drawn into its economic orbit, attracted by the hugeness of its market.
The Rise of China — Implications for India speaks of an imperative need to “counterbalance” China and advocates an alliance system under U.S. leadership to achieve it. The volume presents a collection of essays as part of a “project”, portraying that China is bent on preventing the rise of other regional powers — especially Japan and India — “in order to attain primacy” in the Asia-Pacific, “concentrating on the accretion of military might”, and “changing the military balance in Asia and beyond”.
Harsh Pant, editor of the volume, is convinced that, as China grapples with intractable internal problems, its “communist political regime” would be constrained to use nationalism as a tool to divert domestic public attention and tempted to rely on “targeting its external adversaries and India, in many ways, presents an easy target.”
Strained relations
The Sino-Indian relationship is already strained and an arms race is certain, and he would, therefore, argue that India's strategic interests would be served by an Asia-Pacific arrangement “where the U.S. retains its predominant status.” On its part, the U.S. happens to favour a strong bilateral alliance with India to “act as a bulwark against the arc of Islamic instability running from the Middle East to Asia and to create a much greater balance in Asia.” Yet, Pant doesn't let us into his secret as to how America's tryst with “Islamic instability” could be the leitmotif of a U.S.-India “alliance”.
The book imposes a fundamentalist viewpoint. It overlooks the geopolitics of the U.S.'s “return to Asia” and blithely assumes that Uncle Sam is all dressed up in military fatigue raring to fight the Chinese dragon. The essays in it, though, do not necessarily bear out Pant's thesis, and some of them present eclectic views that reject his opinions. There is a fine piece by Bibek Debroy comparing the reform programmes of China and India and explaining how China ended up “far ahead of India, including virtually in every economic sector.”
Again, Varaprasad Dolla gives an engrossing account of domestic politics in China, where the political logic of economic development is to derive legitimacy for state power; there has been a “steady retreat of the state in regulating society”; and the communist party itself has been going through a “process of transition and transformation.”
Border row
Two American contributors — David Scott and Elliot Sperling — have respectively handled with extraordinary candour the India-China border dispute and the Tibet problem. The border dispute is a can of worms and Scott argues that “some sort of trade off involving Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh seems the most likely way forward,” while Tawang remains “problematic.” But then, the crux of the matter is also that India has “refused to lay out its formal position, other than the reiteration of its full claims.”
The book, however, fails to ask some honest questions. How far are Asian countries interested in a Pax Americana? How threatening is the Sino-Pak military cooperation for India's security? What prompts China to develop a Silk Road through South Asian countries into the Indian Ocean? Surely, the military modernisation of China and India has a greater logic in our troubled world than just their mutual tensions.
Going up the greasy pole of the world order isn't going to be easy for China and India — the two world powers that accounted for 40 per cent of global trade in the mid-19th century but were thrown out of the pedestal. The fact is that the steady shift in the locus of global power to Asia threatens to end some five or six centuries of dominance by the western world. And the West isn't going to roll over. “Projects” like ‘The Rise of China: Implications for India' fudge the great game. That brings us to a puzzle: What is the “Project” really about? The best part is that the Indian establishment wasn't even remotely associated with it.
M. K. Bhadrakumar
arts, culture and entertainment books and literature
Speaks of an imperative need to “counterbalance” China and advocates an alliance system under U.S. leadership to achieve it
China's rise has been singularly dramatic. Its extraordinary economic growth has begun transforming the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region. China is embroiled in a host of problems at home. All the same, there is immense interest in seeing how the surge of Chinese power and influence is going to play out.
Interwoven with it is the angst that the United States' “unipolar moment” might be coming to an end. While the Europeans see the rising China as an economic opportunity, the Americans perceive it as an economic threat. As the balance of economic power in Asia is shifting in favour of China, the U.S. watches with nervousness. As China's GDP rises, the countries on its periphery get irresistibly drawn into its economic orbit, attracted by the hugeness of its market.
The Rise of China — Implications for India speaks of an imperative need to “counterbalance” China and advocates an alliance system under U.S. leadership to achieve it. The volume presents a collection of essays as part of a “project”, portraying that China is bent on preventing the rise of other regional powers — especially Japan and India — “in order to attain primacy” in the Asia-Pacific, “concentrating on the accretion of military might”, and “changing the military balance in Asia and beyond”.
Harsh Pant, editor of the volume, is convinced that, as China grapples with intractable internal problems, its “communist political regime” would be constrained to use nationalism as a tool to divert domestic public attention and tempted to rely on “targeting its external adversaries and India, in many ways, presents an easy target.”
Strained relations
The Sino-Indian relationship is already strained and an arms race is certain, and he would, therefore, argue that India's strategic interests would be served by an Asia-Pacific arrangement “where the U.S. retains its predominant status.” On its part, the U.S. happens to favour a strong bilateral alliance with India to “act as a bulwark against the arc of Islamic instability running from the Middle East to Asia and to create a much greater balance in Asia.” Yet, Pant doesn't let us into his secret as to how America's tryst with “Islamic instability” could be the leitmotif of a U.S.-India “alliance”.
The book imposes a fundamentalist viewpoint. It overlooks the geopolitics of the U.S.'s “return to Asia” and blithely assumes that Uncle Sam is all dressed up in military fatigue raring to fight the Chinese dragon. The essays in it, though, do not necessarily bear out Pant's thesis, and some of them present eclectic views that reject his opinions. There is a fine piece by Bibek Debroy comparing the reform programmes of China and India and explaining how China ended up “far ahead of India, including virtually in every economic sector.”
Again, Varaprasad Dolla gives an engrossing account of domestic politics in China, where the political logic of economic development is to derive legitimacy for state power; there has been a “steady retreat of the state in regulating society”; and the communist party itself has been going through a “process of transition and transformation.”
Border row
Two American contributors — David Scott and Elliot Sperling — have respectively handled with extraordinary candour the India-China border dispute and the Tibet problem. The border dispute is a can of worms and Scott argues that “some sort of trade off involving Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh seems the most likely way forward,” while Tawang remains “problematic.” But then, the crux of the matter is also that India has “refused to lay out its formal position, other than the reiteration of its full claims.”
The book, however, fails to ask some honest questions. How far are Asian countries interested in a Pax Americana? How threatening is the Sino-Pak military cooperation for India's security? What prompts China to develop a Silk Road through South Asian countries into the Indian Ocean? Surely, the military modernisation of China and India has a greater logic in our troubled world than just their mutual tensions.
Going up the greasy pole of the world order isn't going to be easy for China and India — the two world powers that accounted for 40 per cent of global trade in the mid-19th century but were thrown out of the pedestal. The fact is that the steady shift in the locus of global power to Asia threatens to end some five or six centuries of dominance by the western world. And the West isn't going to roll over. “Projects” like ‘The Rise of China: Implications for India' fudge the great game. That brings us to a puzzle: What is the “Project” really about? The best part is that the Indian establishment wasn't even remotely associated with it.
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, men who saved India-February 1, 2012
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, men who saved India
Amulya Ganguli | Wednesday, February 1, 2012
In a recent article, Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Lahore University professor, wrote: “It is time to reflect on what makes so many Pakistanis disposed towards celebrating murder, lawlessness and intolerance ... to understand the kind of psychological conditioning that has turned us into nasty brutes”. A one-line answer is that Pakistan did not have Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru at the time of its “moth-eaten” formation, to quote Jinnah. From this response follows the corollary — that the absence of Gandhi and Nehru would have turned Indians, too, into “nasty brutes” and their country would have resembled Pakistan in its dysfunctional state. The satisfaction which Indians draw today from the country’s stable, multi-cultural democracy would not have been a feature of the polity at all because, without Gandhi’s and Nehru’s sane presence in 1947, Indians would have been constantly at each other’s throats on the grounds of religion, caste, language and any other conceivable divisive factor.
It cannot be gainsaid that more than any other person, Gandhi saved us from an apocalyptic fate. He might have been unable to prevent Partition because he had become a “back number”, as he lamented, and could not convince even those closest to him, like Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, to agree to make Jinnah the prime minister. But his inestimable contribution was to prevent the pre- and post-Partition riots from spreading and intensifying by employing his brahmastra — fasting. If the Mahatma hadn’t been there to restore rationality among the “nasty brutes”, the country would not have known any respite from communal conflagration for years. The outcome would have been something like Lebanon in the 1980s and Rwanda in the 1990s with India being torn apart in seemingly endless civil strife.
Gandhi had to pay with his life for angering those who wanted the fratricidal mindset which led to the creation of Pakistan to be India’s defining feature as well, thereby ensuring that the minorities would have no more than second-class status and live “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation [a saffron echo of the two-nation theory], claiming nothing, deserving no privileges ... not even citizen’s rights”, as Golwalkar of the RSS decreed. But Gandhi’s assassination purged the country of the curse of violent sectarianism and ensured that it would remain united, unlike Pakistan, which broke up in 1971, confirming Jinnah’s confession on his death bed that Pakistan was the “biggest blunder of my life”, as recounted in Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of a Empire.
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But it wasn’t Gandhi alone who saved India. A sterling role was played by Nehru in cementing the foundations of secularism by constantly reminding his countrymen of the country’s pluralism, and ensuring that democracy would strike firm roots. He could have easily become a dictator, not least because he detected authoritarian traits in himself. Writing anonymously in the Modern Review in 1937, Nehru warned: “Caesarism is always at the door and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?” (It was left to his daughter to fancy herself in such a role, but that is another story.)
But in the mid-1940s, the warning was necessary because, for one, India was making the transition from colonial rule to a democracy — a transition that Pakistan has been unable to make in a real sense — and, for another, Ambedkar had said that “Bhakti or the path of devotion or hero worship plays a part in its [India’s] politics unequalled in magnitude” elsewhere. Continuing, he said that “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics, Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”.
If the Mahatma exorcised communalism to save India, the man who wouldn’t be Caesar rendered the same service by assuring the non-Hindi-speaking people that Hindi would not be the sole official language unless those who did not speak the language wanted it. Nehru’s broadmindedness is obvious when compared with Jinnah’s imposition of Urdu on East Pakistan, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka’s choice of Sinhalese as the island’s official language, and of Buddhism as the official religion, which sparked a long civil war.
It is sad that there isn’t adequate appreciation today of the contributions of these two men, one of whom deserves to be called “great”, in saving the country.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
Amulya Ganguli | Wednesday, February 1, 2012
In a recent article, Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Lahore University professor, wrote: “It is time to reflect on what makes so many Pakistanis disposed towards celebrating murder, lawlessness and intolerance ... to understand the kind of psychological conditioning that has turned us into nasty brutes”. A one-line answer is that Pakistan did not have Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru at the time of its “moth-eaten” formation, to quote Jinnah. From this response follows the corollary — that the absence of Gandhi and Nehru would have turned Indians, too, into “nasty brutes” and their country would have resembled Pakistan in its dysfunctional state. The satisfaction which Indians draw today from the country’s stable, multi-cultural democracy would not have been a feature of the polity at all because, without Gandhi’s and Nehru’s sane presence in 1947, Indians would have been constantly at each other’s throats on the grounds of religion, caste, language and any other conceivable divisive factor.
It cannot be gainsaid that more than any other person, Gandhi saved us from an apocalyptic fate. He might have been unable to prevent Partition because he had become a “back number”, as he lamented, and could not convince even those closest to him, like Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, to agree to make Jinnah the prime minister. But his inestimable contribution was to prevent the pre- and post-Partition riots from spreading and intensifying by employing his brahmastra — fasting. If the Mahatma hadn’t been there to restore rationality among the “nasty brutes”, the country would not have known any respite from communal conflagration for years. The outcome would have been something like Lebanon in the 1980s and Rwanda in the 1990s with India being torn apart in seemingly endless civil strife.
Gandhi had to pay with his life for angering those who wanted the fratricidal mindset which led to the creation of Pakistan to be India’s defining feature as well, thereby ensuring that the minorities would have no more than second-class status and live “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation [a saffron echo of the two-nation theory], claiming nothing, deserving no privileges ... not even citizen’s rights”, as Golwalkar of the RSS decreed. But Gandhi’s assassination purged the country of the curse of violent sectarianism and ensured that it would remain united, unlike Pakistan, which broke up in 1971, confirming Jinnah’s confession on his death bed that Pakistan was the “biggest blunder of my life”, as recounted in Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of a Empire.
Article continues below the advertisement...
But it wasn’t Gandhi alone who saved India. A sterling role was played by Nehru in cementing the foundations of secularism by constantly reminding his countrymen of the country’s pluralism, and ensuring that democracy would strike firm roots. He could have easily become a dictator, not least because he detected authoritarian traits in himself. Writing anonymously in the Modern Review in 1937, Nehru warned: “Caesarism is always at the door and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?” (It was left to his daughter to fancy herself in such a role, but that is another story.)
But in the mid-1940s, the warning was necessary because, for one, India was making the transition from colonial rule to a democracy — a transition that Pakistan has been unable to make in a real sense — and, for another, Ambedkar had said that “Bhakti or the path of devotion or hero worship plays a part in its [India’s] politics unequalled in magnitude” elsewhere. Continuing, he said that “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics, Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”.
If the Mahatma exorcised communalism to save India, the man who wouldn’t be Caesar rendered the same service by assuring the non-Hindi-speaking people that Hindi would not be the sole official language unless those who did not speak the language wanted it. Nehru’s broadmindedness is obvious when compared with Jinnah’s imposition of Urdu on East Pakistan, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka’s choice of Sinhalese as the island’s official language, and of Buddhism as the official religion, which sparked a long civil war.
It is sad that there isn’t adequate appreciation today of the contributions of these two men, one of whom deserves to be called “great”, in saving the country.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
Amulya Ganguli | Wednesday, February 1, 2012
In a recent article, Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Lahore University professor, wrote: “It is time to reflect on what makes so many Pakistanis disposed towards celebrating murder, lawlessness and intolerance ... to understand the kind of psychological conditioning that has turned us into nasty brutes”. A one-line answer is that Pakistan did not have Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru at the time of its “moth-eaten” formation, to quote Jinnah. From this response follows the corollary — that the absence of Gandhi and Nehru would have turned Indians, too, into “nasty brutes” and their country would have resembled Pakistan in its dysfunctional state. The satisfaction which Indians draw today from the country’s stable, multi-cultural democracy would not have been a feature of the polity at all because, without Gandhi’s and Nehru’s sane presence in 1947, Indians would have been constantly at each other’s throats on the grounds of religion, caste, language and any other conceivable divisive factor.
It cannot be gainsaid that more than any other person, Gandhi saved us from an apocalyptic fate. He might have been unable to prevent Partition because he had become a “back number”, as he lamented, and could not convince even those closest to him, like Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, to agree to make Jinnah the prime minister. But his inestimable contribution was to prevent the pre- and post-Partition riots from spreading and intensifying by employing his brahmastra — fasting. If the Mahatma hadn’t been there to restore rationality among the “nasty brutes”, the country would not have known any respite from communal conflagration for years. The outcome would have been something like Lebanon in the 1980s and Rwanda in the 1990s with India being torn apart in seemingly endless civil strife.
Gandhi had to pay with his life for angering those who wanted the fratricidal mindset which led to the creation of Pakistan to be India’s defining feature as well, thereby ensuring that the minorities would have no more than second-class status and live “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation [a saffron echo of the two-nation theory], claiming nothing, deserving no privileges ... not even citizen’s rights”, as Golwalkar of the RSS decreed. But Gandhi’s assassination purged the country of the curse of violent sectarianism and ensured that it would remain united, unlike Pakistan, which broke up in 1971, confirming Jinnah’s confession on his death bed that Pakistan was the “biggest blunder of my life”, as recounted in Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of a Empire.
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But it wasn’t Gandhi alone who saved India. A sterling role was played by Nehru in cementing the foundations of secularism by constantly reminding his countrymen of the country’s pluralism, and ensuring that democracy would strike firm roots. He could have easily become a dictator, not least because he detected authoritarian traits in himself. Writing anonymously in the Modern Review in 1937, Nehru warned: “Caesarism is always at the door and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?” (It was left to his daughter to fancy herself in such a role, but that is another story.)
But in the mid-1940s, the warning was necessary because, for one, India was making the transition from colonial rule to a democracy — a transition that Pakistan has been unable to make in a real sense — and, for another, Ambedkar had said that “Bhakti or the path of devotion or hero worship plays a part in its [India’s] politics unequalled in magnitude” elsewhere. Continuing, he said that “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics, Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”.
If the Mahatma exorcised communalism to save India, the man who wouldn’t be Caesar rendered the same service by assuring the non-Hindi-speaking people that Hindi would not be the sole official language unless those who did not speak the language wanted it. Nehru’s broadmindedness is obvious when compared with Jinnah’s imposition of Urdu on East Pakistan, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka’s choice of Sinhalese as the island’s official language, and of Buddhism as the official religion, which sparked a long civil war.
It is sad that there isn’t adequate appreciation today of the contributions of these two men, one of whom deserves to be called “great”, in saving the country.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
Amulya Ganguli | Wednesday, February 1, 2012
In a recent article, Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Lahore University professor, wrote: “It is time to reflect on what makes so many Pakistanis disposed towards celebrating murder, lawlessness and intolerance ... to understand the kind of psychological conditioning that has turned us into nasty brutes”. A one-line answer is that Pakistan did not have Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru at the time of its “moth-eaten” formation, to quote Jinnah. From this response follows the corollary — that the absence of Gandhi and Nehru would have turned Indians, too, into “nasty brutes” and their country would have resembled Pakistan in its dysfunctional state. The satisfaction which Indians draw today from the country’s stable, multi-cultural democracy would not have been a feature of the polity at all because, without Gandhi’s and Nehru’s sane presence in 1947, Indians would have been constantly at each other’s throats on the grounds of religion, caste, language and any other conceivable divisive factor.
It cannot be gainsaid that more than any other person, Gandhi saved us from an apocalyptic fate. He might have been unable to prevent Partition because he had become a “back number”, as he lamented, and could not convince even those closest to him, like Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, to agree to make Jinnah the prime minister. But his inestimable contribution was to prevent the pre- and post-Partition riots from spreading and intensifying by employing his brahmastra — fasting. If the Mahatma hadn’t been there to restore rationality among the “nasty brutes”, the country would not have known any respite from communal conflagration for years. The outcome would have been something like Lebanon in the 1980s and Rwanda in the 1990s with India being torn apart in seemingly endless civil strife.
Gandhi had to pay with his life for angering those who wanted the fratricidal mindset which led to the creation of Pakistan to be India’s defining feature as well, thereby ensuring that the minorities would have no more than second-class status and live “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation [a saffron echo of the two-nation theory], claiming nothing, deserving no privileges ... not even citizen’s rights”, as Golwalkar of the RSS decreed. But Gandhi’s assassination purged the country of the curse of violent sectarianism and ensured that it would remain united, unlike Pakistan, which broke up in 1971, confirming Jinnah’s confession on his death bed that Pakistan was the “biggest blunder of my life”, as recounted in Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of a Empire.
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But it wasn’t Gandhi alone who saved India. A sterling role was played by Nehru in cementing the foundations of secularism by constantly reminding his countrymen of the country’s pluralism, and ensuring that democracy would strike firm roots. He could have easily become a dictator, not least because he detected authoritarian traits in himself. Writing anonymously in the Modern Review in 1937, Nehru warned: “Caesarism is always at the door and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?” (It was left to his daughter to fancy herself in such a role, but that is another story.)
But in the mid-1940s, the warning was necessary because, for one, India was making the transition from colonial rule to a democracy — a transition that Pakistan has been unable to make in a real sense — and, for another, Ambedkar had said that “Bhakti or the path of devotion or hero worship plays a part in its [India’s] politics unequalled in magnitude” elsewhere. Continuing, he said that “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics, Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”.
If the Mahatma exorcised communalism to save India, the man who wouldn’t be Caesar rendered the same service by assuring the non-Hindi-speaking people that Hindi would not be the sole official language unless those who did not speak the language wanted it. Nehru’s broadmindedness is obvious when compared with Jinnah’s imposition of Urdu on East Pakistan, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka’s choice of Sinhalese as the island’s official language, and of Buddhism as the official religion, which sparked a long civil war.
It is sad that there isn’t adequate appreciation today of the contributions of these two men, one of whom deserves to be called “great”, in saving the country.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
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